KP Finley. Cover of Robin Boyd’s book ‘The Australian Ugliness’. First published in 1960. Original cover drawing by Robin Boyd. Reimagined in 2023.

KP Finley. Super rainbow. Mirror tiles, neon light, skate wheels and mirror plinth. 2023

KP Finley. Super rainbow. Mirror tiles, neon light, skate wheels and mirror plinth 2023. Based on the Italian architectural group, Superstudio’s work, The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanisation. 1969 – 71.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Published in 1960.

The first chapter of Robin Boyd’s 1960 book, The Australian Ugliness. Paper. 2023

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 7. Published in 1960.

“Pink eyes stare out for the first glimpse of Australia still filled with an even, empty greyness”. Contains an image of Scott Johnson, an American living in Australia who was murdered in a gay/hate attack in Sydney in 1988. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Published in 1960. Pg 8 & 9.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Published in 1960. Pg 7, 8 & 9. Installation view.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 8. Published in 1960.

“This is the Australian, hard, raw, yet is not malevolent in appearance into the background of Australian life. Its presence cannot be forgotten”. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 9. Published in 1960.

“Featurism is by no means confined to Australia”. Contain an image of Marsha P. Johnson who was an American gay liberation activist. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 9. Published in 1960.

Featurism is by no means confined to Australia. Paper stacks, A3 in size. Installation view. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 10. Published in 1960.

“To hide the truth and camouflage. Camouflage has always been a favoured practice. In Australia. A faint stigma. Veneering has become entirely respectable”. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 11. Published in 1960.

“To disguise reality more completely it is necessary for the Featurist to resort to camouflage, and no one cares”.

Contains an image of Australian drag legend Miss Candy. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 12. Published in 1960.

“Voluntarily or involuntarily. Featurism dogs Australia even when she sets out with good intentions of avoiding it”. Contains an image of Ross Warren, who was murdered in a gay/hate attack in Sydney in 1989. Digitally altered. Paper. 2023.

KP Finley. Super rainbow. Mirror tiles, neon light, skate wheels and mirror plinth. 2023. Based on the Italian architectural group, Superstudio’s work, The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanisation. 1969 – 71.

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Published in 1960.

The Australian Ugliness by KP Finley.

Australian architect and architectural critic Robin Boyd’s seminal critique on Australian suburban life and architecture The Australian Ugliness was first published in 1960. In the book, Boyd highlighted Australian architecture’s need to mask its true identity with kitsch materials and imported architectural styles unsuited to the Australian climate and landscape. Boyd referred to this phenomenon as “featurism”. As Emma Letizia Jones states:

“Boyd rejected outright the pervasive signs of a commercial kitsch architectural currency he labelled “Featurism”, and it was characterised by veneers of all sorts: brick veneer construction in the suburbs, brightly coloured plastic veneers in the home, veneers of advertising in the streets, veneers of “Australian character” on an international Western culture. Against this imported Featurism worn as a prettifying mask, Boyd argued for a truly Australian Modern beyond mere cosmetic effects, which he sought through his own architectural projects” (Jones 2014) 

Featurism provided architects and builders the opportunity to ‘cover up’ the true identity of a building making it appear as something it was not.

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Contents page. Published in 1960

But this was a period when masking was all the rage, not just in architecture. As Emma Letizia Jones also states, “Featurism in short was the adopted visual style of an ambivalent, uncertain population at odds with its surroundings, unsure of how to inhabit them, clinging to the edges of a continent and looking everywhere for answers but into its own interior” (Jones 2014 p. 96). The post-war era of the 1950s and 1960s was a period of extreme conservatism in Australia. This period coincided with conservative social and cultural attitudes to sexuality and identity. To survive many LGBTQI+ people felt the need to mask their identity. Rachel Morgain highlights the repression and victimisation during this period. She states:

“The years following the Second World War saw a drive to consolidate the family, encourage women to have children and push them out of unconventional war-time jobs, so that there would be positions for returned soldiers. The campaign against homosexuality in the 1950s was an escalation of this process, seeking to rectify the decline in social discipline that conservatives argued had occurred during the war. Over a few years, there was a sharp increase in the number of people charged with and convicted of homosexual offences. Police actively entrapped homosexual men. A special squad targeting homosexuality was set up in the Victorian police and the NSW police superintendent labelled homosexuality ‘the greatest social menace facing Australia’. Homosexuals in the public service became particular targets. There were moves to isolate homosexual men in NSW prisons and to have them locked up in mental institutions. The tabloid press was filled with scandals about gay men. What little coverage there was in the quality press sent a clear message to anyone thinking of straying from the heterosexual norm: that path could lead only to shame and arrest”. (Morgain 2004 p. 5)

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 7. Published in 1960.

To survive during this period masking by the LGBTQI+ community became a necessity. Certain clothing, hairstyles, and jewellery were to be avoided. Appropriate clothing provided the armour that concealed one’s true identity. Joel Sanders highlights this in the preface to the 2021 reissue of his 1996 book ‘Stud: The Architecture of Masculinity’, “I came to realize that the clothing that clad bodies behaved like the cladding of buildings: wall finishes, paint, fabrics, curtains, upholstery and furniture are like garments, culturally coded applied surfaces that designers use to fashion human identity” (Sanders 2020 p. 8). Similarly, Boyd’s ‘featurism’ that aimed to clad a building in an identity that, according to him was fake, became locations where queer life happened. In this project, I argue that despite the masking of both queer people and architecture, queer identity occurred allowing architecture to become queer space via memory. 

By the 1960s bold civil liberties groups and the New York Stonewall Riots in 1969 were seen as a turning point, gay liberation and activism exploded. The LGBTQI+ community began to move out of the fringes and into the mainstream. As laws were repealed, homosexuality decimalised, and attitudes changed our relationship to queer identity and queer space also changed. Boyd’s book The Australian Ugliness provided a snapshot of a particular time in Australia’s cultural and built history, one that was masked in Featurism in search of an identity.  But as Peter Conrad states: “Books that quarrel with the way things inevitably lose their point when things change. But it’s no disgrace to re-treat into history, and The Australian Ugliness testifies to a confused and uncertain period in the national life that, with a little help from Boyd, we happily outgrew” (Conrad, p. 63). Sadly, masking one’s identity is still an issue for many in the LGBTQI+ community. To suggest all is well regarding LGBTQI+ rights is an understatement¹. However, this project provides the opportunity to engage with queer lives and queer space by marking the location within the pages of Boyd’s book where queer memories occurred and are remembered.

Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Chapter 1: The Descent into Chaos. Pg 8 & 9. Published in 1960.

Regardless of the featurism found in Australian suburban homes, they were still locations where memories were made. Inspired by artist Tom Phillips’s project ‘A Humument; A Treated Victorian Novel 1966 – 2016, in which Phillips randomly ‘began to doctor the pages with images, both abstract and figurative’ (Kidd, 2012), this project uses the locations found in the text of Boyd book The Australian Ugliness as data points to highlight queer spaces that had the potential for this to occur through fictional recollections, photographs, digital imagery and drawings placed on Boyd text. These are fictional coming-out stories of opportunities that were never recorded but may have happened, but because of the entrenched homophobia and laws in place during this period, a veneer was put in place to mask queer existence in the built environment. With that veneer removed we are now able to engage with locations marked as a place that ‘queer’ happened and remember. 

Notes.

1. In the United States of America there have been over 120 Bills Restricting LGBTQ Rights Introduced Nationwide in 2023. Most relate to trans issues. https://www.tracktranslegislation.com/

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